No Beast So Fierce

by Edward Bunker

  The procession disappeared. The crowd closed in its wake. The work whistle sliced the air. The gate slid open and in minutes the yard had only a scattering of convicts.

  Aaron was near the east cell house wall; he was alone, as usual. His brown head, shaved and oiled, glistened in a vagrant sliver of sunlight. Tucked under his arm were three thick books, all on higher mathematics. His faint smile on seeing me was the equal of a gush of affection from most persons. His ambition was to face life with precise, scientific detachment, with as little emotion as possible. The only decoration in his cell was a charcoal sketch of Albert Einstein.

  We shook hands. In prison, the gesture was more than empty ritual. It was the clasp of friendship.

  “How do you feel?” he asked.

  “Up tight.”

  “Are you ready?”

  “I’m jack-ready for some freedom. How ready I am for a parole officer is another question.”

  “After eight years you’re ready as you’ll ever be.”

  “Yeah, if I’m not ready now I’ll never be ready. I know I hope I’m ready.”

  “Let’s walk a few minutes. I told the doc I’d be late for work.”

  We began to pace the now-empty yard. Though we were the same height—six feet—he outweighed me by thirty pounds, all of it in shoulder, chest, and arm. Years ago, before the racial climate brought too many ugly stares from both black and white, we used to pace the length of the yard for an hour or two at least once a week. The walking habit had developed because if we remained in one place our friends would walk up and intrude in the conversation. The occasional serious conversations we shared—about books and their content—had had a salutary effect on me. Prison conversations usually concern murder, mayhem, homosexuality, gambling, narcotics, stool pigeons, cops, and escape. The all-purpose word is “motherfucker”, serving as noun, verb, adverb, and adjective—it’s meaning depending on context and intonation. Remove this word from the convict vocabulary and prisons will fall silent. Neither the vulgarity nor the topics offended me; they were too close to my own existence. But an unrelieved diet of them left me hungry for something different. Aaron’s intelligence stimulated me. In his eleven years of imprisonment he’d learned to speak Spanish, French, and Portuguese, had mastered computer programming and electronics, was a dental technician. His reading habits were less eclectic than mine, but he had a unique precision of mind.

  This was our first walk in six months. I’d backed away from him. He knew the reason and had said nothing. We’d never have become friends if the foundation hadn’t been placed before racial hate began erupting into wars. The atmosphere had changed in the last two years. The rifles kept things from erupting into wholesale massacre, but there were murderous skirmishes. If a black was stabbed by a white, whatever the reason, there would be retaliation: several blacks would suddenly rush down a tier and stab any white available. Whites would wait and reciprocate. Aaron viewed both sides as ignorant. This was not because he disclaimed his heritage or lacked pride—but he refused to make it a condition of shame or a rallying point of hatred. Quite simply, he found racists on either side to have unsustainable attitudes, lacking scientific foundation. And it was not white convicts who were the problem, assuming the blacks could change the world with violence. The blacks disliked him, too, because he disdained their ignorance. If they tried to force their opinions on him, he could make them back up, for his calm was not fear or passivity. He could be dangerous. He met every person as an individual, and no amount of ignorance could dissuade him. This view created an unusual situation. Many militant white racists treated him as a person first, his negritude being secondary. In other words they reacted to him as he reacted to himself.

  When I came to prison I had few prejudices, despite having been through racial gang fights in reform schools.

  Now I hate most blacks—because of their paranoia. Suspicion on their part may be justified, but paranoia is a disease. If they hate my whiteness, I hate their blackness. They hate whitey; they want revenge, not equality. They consider themselves unbound by white laws and moral codes. They pose a direct and immediate threat to me, and to meet it a loathing and hatred has grown—so when I look into their amber eyes glowing with hate, my blue eyes glow with a mirrored hate.

  I was ashamed of this attitude where Aaron was concerned, but the prison’s racial situation was something we seldom talked about, having agreed that there were no universally acceptable answers. But the situation had driven us apart—not our friendship—and so we talked infrequently. And this would be the last time.

  “I’ve only got a couple minutes,” I said. “You want me to help you escape from camp—if you go to camp.”

  “Here’s the situation, precisely. I’ve got eleven years served and I’ve been eligible for parole for four. I go to the board again next month. Yesterday I saw my counselor, and if the board denies me again he’s going to recommend to the classification committee that I go to camp. You already have my mother’s address and I hope you’ll keep in touch with her. I’ll write you there and tell you what to do. All I really want is to have you give me a ride.”

  “If you get denied at the board, if you go to camp, if you send for me, I’ll come for you. But I want you to know something, you’re putting weight on friendship. I wouldn’t give a shit if I was going out to do wrong, but I plan to straighten up. Even before I get there I’m being put in a cross between friendship and breaking the law. I’ll be a dirty motherfucker if it isn’t a drag to promise to commit a felony before I even get out.”

  Aaron grinned and squeezed my shoulder. “I thought it over a long time before I asked. If it was anything less than freedom I wouldn’t ask. And it’s no risk. You know that. Drive up to the Sierras, pick me up, and drive back.”

  “I hope you get parole. You goddam sure got one coming.”

  “What one has coming and what one gets is often quite different.”

  “You’re a cinch next year.”

  “I could say ‘next year’ to doomsday. I’m no mule chasing a carrot.”

  I understood his view—and agreed with it. We walked another lap in silence. I wanted to go. The sooner I reached the front gate the sooner I would be outside the walls. My mind had left him. He understood what was happening. When we reached the end of the yard he stopped and stuck out a brown paw. “Later on, brother. Good luck.”

  “All right.” I grinned. “I’ll be seeing you.”

  It was time to report to Receiving and Release.

  2

  I RODE off the prison property with sixty-five dollars, a cheap suit (ten years out of style), a set of khakis and change of underwear in a brown parcel, and a bus ticket to Los Angeles. A uniformed guard drove me to the depot and waited until I was on board.

  I hurried onto the bus, glad to escape the eyes of the citizens in the depot, eyes attracted to me by the guard. Through the tinted window I watched him depart. An almost electric awareness went through me. I was free. Free!

  Other passengers filtered aboard, heaved bundles onto overhead racks. The idling motor made the vehicle tremble. A sense of unreality, so intense as to make me dizzy, swelled up. Everything was weird. The tinkling resonance of women’s voices, which I hadn’t heard in eight years, was as alien as Chinese to my ears. The variety and color of clothes—the reds and yellows of summer print—crashed against my sensibilities with blinding force. I sat in a trance.

  The driver came down the aisle, a stocky man. His belly rolled over his belt buckle; his hat was off and his hair was damp with perspiration. He joked with each passenger as he checked tickets. On reaching me, his smile disappeared. He grunted, wouldn’t meet my eyes. Shame and anger made me want to retch—but then I wondered if it was just my imagination. Yet the driver resumed his banter at the next passenger. “Fuck it,” I muttered. In a few hours I’d blend into the swarm and nobody would know.

  Brakes whooshed, the diesel motor churned. My freedom journey began. All other feelings were eclipsed in
the excitement of seeing the world beyond the walls. While we inched through the town’s back streets, I soaked up every sight. Commercial garages, body and fender shops, beer joints, and ramshackle grocery stores were pitifully ugly in the unrelenting sunlight—but to me they were beautiful beyond description.

  Soon the bus was in the country. The black asphalt sliced through mile after mile of alfalfa, the emerald growth polished by water from revolving sprinklers. I watched the fields with the fascination of a child at his first kaleidoscope.

  Wheels and hours turned. The bus passed through rolling scrubland—it was beautiful—and small towns where gas stations bustled, farm workers in Stetsons loitered, and children played in the streets. There were more fields, rippling voluptuously beneath fingers of a breeze. I felt as if I could ride the bus through eternity and be happy.

  Two teen-age girls got off in a small town near an airbase. I watched them walk away. They wore stretch pants that clearly outlined thigh and butt. I stared at them hungrily, fantasy rising with swift intensity. Years without a woman sharpens a prisoner’s ability for imagery—one has to have imagination to use a stubble-bearded, plucked-eyebrow fairy. Close your eyes and imagine someone else—perhaps the exotic movie star you saw at the weekend movie. Imagination is necessary where a hand slippery with pomade serves for a woman. Pomade, closed eyes, and imagination. When the two girls disappeared I was worked up with imagining.

  For an hour the bus ground a slow ascent up a canyon between slabbed rock walls spotted with scrub. There was no view. I used the interlude to examine an envelope of papers handed me at the prison gate. Three parole report forms. One was to be filled out and sent in the first week of the month. Name and prison number, address, place of employment, income, savings, description and license of automobile. There was a copy of the parole agreement I’d signed, and its conditions. They were standard—maintain suitable employment (what’s “suitable”?), make no address change and drive no automobile without written permission, no drinking, make no contract, borrow no money, avoid ex-felons and persons of ill repute, and heed the advice and counsel of the parole officer. Failure to comply with any condition was grounds for return to prison without notice or hearing.

  A form letter told me the parole officer’s name was Joseph Rosenthal. I was to contact him and report as soon as I arrived. I liked the idea of having a Jew: Jews had suffered so much that he should have some empathy for my problems.

  The bus stopped for twenty minutes in Santa Barbara. I hurried to the sidewalk, wanting to just walk around until it was time to go. The tangle of movement and color dizzied me. Everything was strange, a different world than I was accustomed to. Impulsively, I ducked into a liquor store for a twenty-five-cent cigar and a half pint of vodka. The desire wasn’t so much to get drunk (I was drunk with freedom already) as to exercise some choice, buy something.

  But drunk I was as the bus swept along the seacoast on the last leg of the Journey. I watched the surf weave lace patterns along the beach and the sea glaze with the molten hues of early summer twilight.

  I forgot the proximity of Los Angeles until the bus turned up a ramp into Santa Monica. Then awareness of being home crashed with complete surprise and some disbelief. As avidly as a child, I pressed my nose against the tinted window and stared out. Each block was familiar, yet each was renewed surprise.

  In West Hollywood we changed boulevards. To the left was the Sunset Strip, and I could see the green hills dotted with white apartments. Memories jumped to mind with almost physical force. This was my territory the year before prison—the only good year in my memory. Not good in any moral sense, quite the contrary, but money had been easy and I’d spent it on easy living, an expensive apartment, sports car, silk suits, good liquor, and food. However meaningless and unfulfilling such a life had been, it was a constant intoxicant. With so much hedonism there was no time to think of “meaning”. That year had cost me eight of nightmare, an unfair bargain.

  The bus entered Hollywood. I recalled dreary stucco bungalows of yellow and pink, already going to seed after their heyday in the ’30s. Now there were high-rise apartments and skyscrapers.

  Suddenly the bus was pulling into a depot. My ticket was for downtown Los Angeles. I hadn’t thought about stopping in Hollywood. Now I grabbed my parcel and hurried off, my stomach churning.

  The depot was small, uncrowded. The time was 5:20. It was late for the parole office to be open, yet I decided to telephone and see.

  A woman answered. Her “please” and “sir” sounded strange. I was more accustomed to “asshole” and “motherfucker”. Rosenthal was still in his office.

  “Hi there, Max,” he said. “I’m surprised that you called. Your bus wasn’t due ’til six and I’d be gone by then.”

  “I got off in Hollywood.”

  “That’s where you are now?”

  “They said I was to contact you on arrival. That’s what I’m doing.”

  “Good. Good. How do you feel?”

  I told him I was a little drunk. Though the statement seemed naive, and it was in a way, there was a test in it. If he accused me of doing wrong, I knew I had a prick and could act accordingly, lying to him forever after. If he passed over it with humor or understanding, I would know that I could manipulate him. But he did neither. He just said, “Oh,” and I blushed, cursed myself as a fool—for not having learned the lesson to keep my mouth shut to authority. He asked where the deport was located. And the bizarre thing was that I didn’t know. I’d been born in Hollywood but remembered no bus depot. Leaving the receiver to hang, I walked outdoors.

  The street sign said Vine Street; the cross sign said DeLonpre Avenue. I must have passed the bus depot hundreds of times without noticing it.

  I froze, looked around in fascinated wonder. To the left was the downtown Hollywood skyline, familiar to me since childhood—now both known and new as birth. Beyond were the low, hazed hills with a giant sign, Hollywood, perched on top. To the right, a block away, was the Ranch Market. It was old and huge, open-stalled in the style of another era. The sight of it brought a rash of memories. In the postmidnight hours the market—its hot dog stand and magazine rack—catered to weirdos and geeks, freaks and tipsy whores and their pimps. One had to pass the hot dog stand to reach the parking lot, and here at darkness gathered the strange people, watching with predatory eyes those who shopped at 3:30 A.M., cocktail waitresses and musicians red-eyed from smoky bars and marijuana, pills, booze, inadequate sleep. In my teens, too young for bars, with nowhere to go, I’d come to the market on the prowl for a drunk or a fairy to lure somewhere and knock in the head—for fifteen or twenty dollars.

  During daylight it may have been just another market. I’d only seen it in the middle of the night.

  Remembering Rosenthal, I hurried back, gave him directions, and promised to wait on the corner; he was going to stop on his way home from work.

  Before going outside, I bought a handful of picture postcards and addressed them to friends left behind in the cage. I had appreciated the gesture from others in the past and was certain my friends would do the same.

  The shadows were lengthening and a wind was rising. It was the first twilight I’d seen in eight years, for the prison was locked up at four in the afternoon. Leroy, Aaron, all the numbered men, were now settled with earphones, books, thoughts.

  Rosenthal arrived in a plain, compact automobile, pulling up to double-park and beckon me. I got in quickly and he pulled around the corner, parking on a residential street of small bungalows. My first impression was of a fat, merry little pig in rimless glasses. Bristles of a heavy beard contributed to this impression; so did his suit, which was far too tight on the pudgy frame. This was exaggerated by a moon face squirting from a tight collar. Perched on his head was a ridiculous porkpie hat with a green feather. His appearance was more absurd than threatening.

  The advantage I had of appraising him while he drove was more than offset by his having a large file on me. He eyed me with f
rank curiosity while we shook hands.

  “I imagine you feel pretty good,” he said. “You were busted a long time.”

  “Yeah, I’m kind of dizzy, freedom drunk.” I was trying to place a trace of doubt in his mind about what I’d said over the telephone. His eyes narrowed; he had joined the statements. He said nothing about it.

  “You don’t look so tough,” he said, smiling affably, getting to what he knew from the file. I grinned back with a candor I didn’t feel. There was no forgetting that our relationship was essentially that of a knife held to a throat. He could order me jailed whenever he felt like it. I sensed that his affability hinged on my agreeing with him.

  “Think you can do this parole?” he asked.

  “I don’t see why not. It’s just a matter of living like millions of other people. I’ve got problems, but they’re inside me and I should be able to handle what’s in myself.”

  “Good, positive attitude. But sometimes it seems harder than that for men who’ve been in prison. They need help. That’s what I’m here for. I’ve seen both good and bad in your jacket. Most parole officers have eighty or ninety cases. I’ve only got thirteen—special cases.”

  “I’m a special case … I only had a forgery.”

  “A forgery, yes. But the record goes back so many years, and there’s been episodes of violence. That’s why you’re a special case.”

  “I need more watching,” I said bitterly.

  “They think so, and it’s my job.” He paused, then went on, “You don’t have a job, so to get my supervisor to approve your release on schedule I had to submit something. I’ve got you a place in a halfway house on Twenty-fourth and Vermont.”

  “Halfway house!” The idea of going to a rescue mission for exconvicts, which halfway houses are, made me sick. And the address was in what had been the ghetto border eight years before; now the area was 95 percent black, I knew.

  Seeing my feelings, he explained that halfway houses were made for such men as me, those without home or family or assets. “It’s just a refuge until you get settled.”